An abandoned cart is the loss of a customer during the checkout process in an online store. This is a fairly common situation, and one to actively manage as you are so close to converting a sale. So if you are asking “Why do I have so many abandoned carts?”, read on.
In this article we will answer questions like “Why do customers abandon carts?” and “How to avoid cart abandonment?”. But first we will look at cart abandonment rate.
Cart abandonment rate (CAR) is the percentage of users who add a product to their cart and then leave it without placing an order. CAR is calculated using the formula:
(1 – (number of successful transactions / number of cart additions)) * 100%
Let’s say your store generated 500 sales in a month. And the number of times an item was added to the cart without a sale being completed is 2,500. So, using the above calculation, we get a cart abandonment rate of 80%. The average eCommerce cart abandonment rate is around 70-80%, and for some sectors it stretches to 65-85%. Despite the daunting figures, this problem can and should be worked on.
Research by Baymard Institute shows the average cart abandonment rate differs by industry and devices.
If you have enhanced eCommerce Tracking enabled, you can track abandoned carts through the Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualisation. You should see a report for the different stages of your customer’s on-site journey for the time period you selected. When you navigate to Conversions > Goals > Overview the default goal option is ‘all goals’ you see is Total Abandonment Rate
To see how many people leave their shopping carts without buying the products Google Analytics 4 head to the Explore tab > choose to start a Funnel exploration report.
As part of a survey looking at the reasons for checkout abandonment, the Baymard Institute questioned 4,500 Americans. They were asked: What prompted you to abandon a purchase after you added items to your shopping cart?
You can see the results of the survey on the graph.
For 12 years, Atomic Leap has been optimising bounce rates, conversion rates, promoting search engines and advertising online stores across many industries. Based on our experience gained, we will list the eight main reasons why users abandon carts. But more importantly, we’ll tell you how to counter them and therefore how to decrease cart abandonment.
| Problems | Solutions |
|---|---|
| High price | If your product is identical or similar to a product offered by your competitors, people will base their selection on price. If your price is the best, say so (but if you’re talking about it, it better be true!). If you can’t beat the price, offer some other added value. |
| Cost of delivery. Does your site have free shipping? | Try to offer free shipping. If this is not possible, then give the customer a set of actions to make the order process more valuable to you. For example, be inspired by iHerb online stores: When a customer looks in their shopping cart, ask them to register some basic details – just two fields: a name and a phone number. This gives you a means to contact them should they abandon. You can then try to follow up and close the sale at which point you can also attempt to collect any other information you need. |
| Doubts. Will this product suit me? Can I return it? | Use live chat or chatbot service to solve customer problems and answer their questions. Create a solid refund and return policy. |
| Insufficient popularity of your company among the target audience. | Add social proof signals, reviews, replace stock photos with studio ones, add a video review, develop an About page. |
| No choice of payment/delivery | The fewer options your user has to pay and receive the goods, the higher the probability of cart abandonment. Make sure that customers can pay and take delivery of products or services in a variety of ways appropriate to what you sell. Amongst some of the most popular payment methods are: Shopping apps (Shop Pay and PayPal) Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay) Buy now, pay later (Shop Pay Installments, Klarna, Four, and AfterPay) |
| Checkout is challenging | You are requesting too much data from your users which is putting them off. Checkout cptimization can increase conversions by 35.62%. See how you can simplify the buying process to reduce cart abandonment and provide guest checkout options or show customer support contact info during the checkout process. |
| Unable to identify problem areas | Collect customer feedback about pain points. Generate hypotheses and test them with A/B testing.When running A/B tests, you should alter only one variable at a time, so you can identify what impacts the performance of the new campaign. |
| Visitors are not motivated to complete the purchase | Display any deals, applied discounts, or sale prices in your visitors’ cart. Allow customers to save their cart. |
| Problems | Solutions |
|---|---|
| Slow site | Make your web pages fast on all devices. Analyze with PageSpeed Insights. Get your PageSpeed score and use PageSpeed suggestions to make your web site fasterl. |
| Lack of responsive layout | A responsive website is one which changes its layout automatically depending on the screen size it is being viewed on. If someone is ordering on their mobile when out, and your website is not displaying properly it is a recipe for cart abandonment. Check your site for adaptability and cross-browser compatibility. Make sure that all key information is clearly visible on all the main platforms. |
There are several tools that can help you recover abandoned carts and bring customers back to your online store. These tools will most likely not be new to you, but take a look below to refresh you knowledge. Results for 2022, based on the performance of Atomic Leap clients.
Exit intent overlays with surveys can increase conversions by 23% in a product category.
Creating an exit-intent offer that will be shown to a potential customer who, while on the checkout page, suddenly heads to the exit is a good technique. You can again grab their attention with a targeted offer that pops up to encourage them to complete their checkout. You could use time-limited offers, gifts, or attractive discounts and promotions.
Cart abandonment popups have a 17.12% average conversion rate.
It is used for both mobiles as well as desktop users. WebPush notifications will work in some circumstances. If the user agrees to receive them (the consent pop-up usually appears after they enter the site), you will be able to communicate with them via short messages, sending notifications directly to their PC or mobile.
Abandoned cart SMS messages work very well if you have customers’ phone numbers. They usually convert even better than emails, because their open rate reaches 98%. Therefore, if you collect phone numbers, use this functionality to get people to return.
3 out of 4 consumers now notice retargeted Ads, over a quarter (26%) will click on the retargeted ad and return to your site. Retargeting can reduce cart abandonment by 6.5%.
Cart abandonment is a good reason to use retargeting. Place a Facebook or Google Analytics pixel on your checkout page and then you can send customised ads to cart abandoners. To get the most out of your ads:
Cart abandonment emails had a 41.09% open rate in 2022.
An effective way to reduce the number of abandoned carts is to follow up with users by sending emails or SMS. Many eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, 3DCart, and Volusion offer integrated cart abandonment solutions. Do abandoned cart emails work? Let’s take a look.
“How many abandoned cart emails should I send?” you are probably asking. The first abandoned cart email should be sent within 10-30 minutes of cart abandonment. Don’t delay. Abandoned cart emails sent within one hour of abandonment have an excellent conversion rate (20.3%). Second emails sent within 24 hours of the bounce can also lead to higher conversions (17.7%). And a third email should be sent within 72 hours.
Personalized product recommendations can improve cart abandonment by up to 4.35%.
By using customer data and machine learning algorithms, some tools can provide personalized product recommendations to customers who have abandoned their cart, potentially leading them back to your website to complete their purchase.
It’s important to test different approaches and find out what works best for your business. The purchase rate of campaigns using three or more channels is 287% higher than single-channel campaigns.
If, after having a go at optimising your cart abandonment rate, you want to scale your business, you can ask us at Atomic Leap to set up online store integration with Facebook and Instagram. This solution will not only increase the popularity of your store and attract new visitors, but also increase sales. We can also discuss with you bespoke ways for how to improve cart abandonment rate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wayland Coles is MD and Founder performance marketing agency Atomic Leap, where he helps businesses of all sizes capitalize on the power of PPC marketing.
LinkedIn: Wayland Cole